Peanut Buttering

"What's up" doc

I got sick of saying "I don't know" whenever a new medical professional asked about my family medical history. So I chatted with my mom and my dad, asking about our family medical history as far back and in as much detail as they could remember, and I documented it all in a Google Doc. Now when a doctor asks me for my medical history, I pull out the doc and rattle off much more detail than they could have expected or hoped for. It's useful and they are impressed!

Why isn't this the norm?

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Finding a new therapist is hard. It can involve trying lots of different ones until you find a good fit. With each new therapist, you start out the same way - first session might be basically an intake, second session you're still getting to know each other and sharing context, maybe the third session finally starts to be useful. It gets old having the same conversation over and over, like first dates.

I haven't done so, but why not do the same as with the medical history? Write up your life history in brief, the issues you're now dealing with; your reflections, what you've tried, where you're stuck. We can call it a "What's Up" doc. Send it to your therapist to read before the first session, and hit the ground running! As an added bonus, if you've never written all of that out before, just doing will on its own serve as an effective self-therapy session.

Why isn't this the norm?

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To make it easier for potential partners to check for a romantic match, some have taken to writing "date-me docs".

You could try running your pet interests by everyone you meet to figure out who's wedged in the same niche. Or you could write a blog post, "a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox."

At work, you might re-hash the same arguments over and over, swirling and churning, until you finally write a few-paragraph doc and then suddenly you've aligned the group.

It seems that there are many things we tend to do repetitively, off-the-cuff, and poorly, when we could instead do them once, definitively, and expertly. Why isn't this the norm?

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These days, if you simply write out a long-form description of any question or problem, you can probably feed it into ChatGPT and get a solution. In some sense, writing things down is higher-ROI than ever before. Maybe that will change some norms?